


open wide the hymns you hide

by friendly_ficus



Series: from a much outdated style [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU where they're basically gods, Gen, some have greatness thrust upon them, vague nods to canon and even vaguer nods to d&d, what gods are born of this world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 13:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13788354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: Poets make divinity seem possible, tangible, achievable - a poet is not all he is.Or: Interlude One, Scanlan





	open wide the hymns you hide

**Author's Note:**

> This fic only makes sense in the context of the larger series, so read the prologue first if you want to. These interludes are my way of showing what these strange versions of Vox Machina are all about, beginning with Scanlan, and beginning before the larger plot of the story.

  The goblins kill his mother, right in front of him, and he screams. And something in his soul  _ cracks  _ clean through. (When he thinks back to this moment, weighed down by lifetimes of other people’s tragedies, it will remain the worst thing he can imagine.)

  And some whisper, some Other that’s been floating around, unnoticed since the construction of the Divine Gate, hears his spirit break. And it rushes in.

  He’s still Scanlan, is the thing, and he’s young and broken and his mother Juniper is dead. There’s something else, though. Some new heartbeat thumping out of sync with his own, grating against the base of his being. Scanlan has never in his life sought out divinity, but this strange whisper curls up in his throat. When he screams again, the goblins are gore to ash to nothing, flayed away by the sound.

  He sees himself in his mother’s mirror, cracked and broken on the floor, and his eyes are a solid purple glow.

\---

  “I know that look,” a shopkeeper hisses to her assistant, “ _ don’t. _ Just let him go about his business, lad.” The old man toddering through the shop is not what he seems. There’s a glint of purple in his eyes, faint sparks on the edges of his exhale. She could write it off as tricks of the light, but it catches in her mind like an alarm bell.

  (Her assistant is a young man, a poet trying to make it while he holds down this day job, and he likes to knot customers up in riddles. This old man... she doesn’t want her lad to speak to this one.)

  Even like this, bent in the skin of an old beggar, there’s something dangerously compelling about him. She wants to let the lad try it, wants to challenge and listen and stare; she’s leaning over the edge of an abyss, desperate to watch something fall, fly, fall. Still, somehow, she holds.

  As the old man exits the shop he straightens up into the form of a king, huge and broad-shouldered with a resplendent gold and amethyst crown. He turns and tilts his head in a question, and she  _ wants to fly _ .

  The shopkeeper seizes her assistant’s shoulder in a hard grip. She can’t let them be carried away in the show, has to keep them grounded.

  The king shrinks down into a gnome, the crown turns into a striking hat, and he winks at them both. They blink, and he’s gone.

  (“It could have been  _ amazing _ ,” the assistant grumbles.

   “It could have. Maybe not, though. Maybe not.”)

\---

  Scanlan stumbles into the Library, gasping, tumbling from the doorway of his home into the house of a goddess. All movement in the cavernous building stops. (His soul is raw and bleeding, woven through with some young new divinity that’s tearing him apart.)

  Ioun stares at the man who used to be Scanlan Shorthalt for a long moment. Then she reaches out with the gentleness of one who knows agony and renders him, blessedly, unconscious. And she **Looks** , with all her sacred knowledge, for an answer.

  (He is born to a woman named Juniper on a hot summer evening. The frogs are croaking and the crickets are singing and the heat is heavy. At his first cry all the sounds stutter, stop, and resume. Destiny is not her particular area, but Ioun is no fool, and **Looks** deeper.

  Music is his womb - humming and drumbeats and the first twanging strings, the first rhyming history - and it’s beautiful. And it is a lie. She **Looks** again, deeper. The divine core, the holy humming that’s shattering the mortal in front of her has a deeper root.

  The whisper inside him is Born on a tortured scream, glass-breaking and chaotic and ruining. It is not yet fully realized and already it is broken. The only redeeming thing about it is that it survives, impossibly, in a world where gods cannot linger.

  New divinity. Mortal divinity. The danger in such an idea is unspeakable. He is not a god, but he is  _ something _ .)

  Scanlan blinks awake, unsettled in his skin with new currents of power cycling through, new sounds in his ears. He’s sitting in a cozy chair across a low table, feet from a goddess.

  “Who are you?” he croaks out, voice raw and aching.

  “I am Ioun,” answers the sad goddess, “Would you like some tea?”

  He accepts and drinks, reeling in the new smells, the new tastes; it’s like he’s never drank tea before. It’s like he’s been drinking it all this time without a sense of taste. It feels like he’s seen nothing, felt nothing his entire life and now - 

  “What am I now?”

  “Something new.”

\---

  “Nice to meet you, I’m Burt Reynolds, Esquire,” the gnome offers with a grin.

  Dr. Dranzel regards him over the top of a glass of wine for a few moments, before replying, “Bullshit you are. But if you can play as well as you can lie, you’ll fit right in.”

  Scanlan’s grin shifts, becoming a real smile, and he says, “You know, I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not.”

  The Doc laughs loudly. “Welcome aboard, Burt Reynolds, Esquire.”

\---

  Scanlan steps into the Library, humming a tune the Troupe is working on. The spirits around him stop to listen, bobbing along to the beat.

  It brings Ioun some measure of joy to see him happy. (She never forgets the sight of his spirit writhing on her floor.) He’s got his flute, might show her a song he’s been writing. Sometimes, (and she doesn’t forget, exactly, but she puts it out of her mind) sometimes the origin of his divinity seems ill-fitting, almost irrelevant.

  Sometimes, almost.

\---

  It happens on a hot summer night, with frogs croaking and crickets singing; Dr. Dranzel’s Spectacular Traveling Troupe is attacked on the road, by goblins.

  (The less said about the fight the better, but suffice to say it was a quick one.)

  Ears still ringing, the Doc crouches next to his friend. “Burt? Don’t you think it’s time we had a conversation about this?”

  And the purple light bleeding from Scanlan’s eyes dims, and his shoulders sag a little, and the fury in his face softens. His mouth stretches into a bitter parody of a smile, and he nods.

  Ensconced in the stagecoach, Dr. Dranzel looks at him over the rim of a glass of wine.

  The gnome starts, “The first thing you should know is that I have no idea what I’ve become. The second thing is that my name is Scanlan.”

  (Outside, sound stutters, stops, starts again. Inside, a thin crack spiderwebs up the bottle of Dranzel’s wine. Miles away, a bard in a back alley sweet talks their way out of an angry mob.)

  The good Doc sighs at the wine beginning to seep from the green glass, and starts drinking straight from the bottle. “Why don’t we start from the beginning, my friend?”

  And  _ okay, everything but Ioun then _ .

\---

  Ioun looks at him and smiles, impossibly alien and strong, and says, “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  “I don’t  _ know  _ what happened! I don’t know  _ why  _ this happened! I don’t understand - what even  _ am  _ I, because I’m sure not just another gnome anymore.  **What have I become?** ”

  (The air rings.)

  “You were never just another gnome, Scanlan, but that is not the point. Going by the information we have, some remnant of godhood remained on the Prime Material Plane. And if there was enough to change you, there might be enough to change others.”

  Silence. He drinks his tea.

\---

  Kaylie is a miracle. Kaylie is a revelation.

  The first time they meet she nearly kills him.

\---

  Scanlan ambles into the Library, whistling, and the goddess graces him with a smile. She looks good, Ioun - well, she’s a goddess, she always looks awe-inspiring and holy. But they’ve had enough tea together for him to see the days her scars weigh on her.

  (It’s a courtesy she gives him, letting him check on her while pretending he’s not checking on her.)

\---

  He kisses people across Tal’Dorei, charms his way into beds and out of trouble and smiles all the while.

  And if it bothers them that none of them ever know his name, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t remember them for long, anyway.

\---

  The first time he helps someone else lie, the first time he gives them a little extra  _ push _ , it’s like something  **clicks** into place inside him. And then he’s always lying, for a while, in helpful, harmless, harmful ways. (He’s searching for something and he doesn’t know what it is but he needs it like air.)

  He tricks a harbormaster into admitting to embezzling, and he tells a woman she has the most beautiful eyes he’s ever seen, and he walks out of a bank with half a noble’s fortune, and he lies his way into a royal family to kill the king. And then he kills the king.

  When he picks up the crown, a gaudy monstrosity of gold and amethysts, it shifts in his hands, settling into an ostentatious purple hat with an enormous feather. And it’s his in a way no object has ever been before. (Found it, put a little of himself into it, took it.)

  After he gets the hat he settles down a bit, starts mixing the truth back into things. He feels more...  **more** , somehow.

\---

  He has no idea why she’s shoving a sword into his face until Kaylie yells, “And stop  _ lyin to me  _ already!”

  He pulls away, hand clapped to the scratch below his eye, and stares. “What do you mean, lying?”

  Kaylie, flushed and raging and unfamiliar volleys back, “Burt isn’t even your  _ name _ , damn it, it’s what you told my mother and it wasn’t even  _ true _ , what kind of person are you, you bastard-”

  Scanlan, reeling with understanding, cuts in, “Your mother?”

  “Yeah, you  _ asshole _ , now tell me who you are!”

  “My name’s Scanlan Shorthalt.”

  (All sound around them stops for a full second. A composer miles away crafts a string of notes that brings every listener to tears. Kaylie is completely unaffected.)

  “Why did your mother tell you about me?”

  She scrutinizes him for a long moment, shakes her head as if in disbelief, and speaks words that change him more than any words ever have:

  “Because I’m your daughter, you ass.”

\---

  It takes time for them to like each other. Hell, it takes time for them to know anything about each other. Kaylie is brilliant and rightfully angry, and Scanlan is desperate to understand her. The entire world has shifted under his feet.

  (The first time he tries to lie to her, about some small innocuous thing, she punches him in the mouth. Apparently, she can hear untruth. Apparently, she’s always been able to hear untruth.

  “You lie to me again, old man, and I’m gone.”)

  So they wander and travel and talk, and lie to other people but never to each other, and it’s good. It’s amazing. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

  (He will kill anything, anything for her. To keep her safe. His  _ daughter, holy shit. _ )

\---

  Scanlan strides into the Library, a sharply controlled anger in every line of his body, his soul singing out a demanding song. Ioun watches him approach, outwardly calm as the shelves in his vicinity shake faintly. “Would you like-”

  “No, let’s skip the tea. Did you know?”

  Ioun is holy and divine and far more powerful than Scanlan usually wastes his time trying to fathom, and her voice is terrible and soft, “Did I know what, Scanlan.”

  (She recalls a soul dying on her floor, tortured, and he resembles that first meeting now more than he ever has before. His voice shakes, light spills from him; he’s hurt.)

  “About Kaylie. Did you  _ know?”  _ His composure cracks awfully on the last word, and his eyes are bright when he accuses, “Every year she’s been alive is a year I could’ve been a better person. Why wouldn’t  **you tell me about this?** ”

   It is some time before they have tea together again.

\---

  Kaylie’s with the Troupe, when an alarm bell chimes in the back of her head, when some pull she always feels towards Scanlan tugs unbearably, draws tight between them.

  Her bow screeches terribly across her violin, and she turns to meet Dranzel’s eyes with a flash of fear. (Sometimes, the Troupe forgets how young Kaylie really is. When she’s scared, though, she looks it.)

  “Something’s wrong - he’s in trouble.”

  Dr. Dranzel looks at her with a steady gaze and says, “Then we’d better go get him. Troupe! Our man Burt Reynolds, Esq. needs our help!”

  And like a well-oiled machine, the group moves to go about the business of a rescue.

\---

  These people in the robes somehow stole his fucking  _ hat _ , the  _ nerve of them -  _

  Of course, they’ve also stolen _ him _ (the hat was the perfect bait) and put him in some basement in the back end of nowhere, so that’s a thing. There’s a gag in his mouth and everything is hazy, and try as he might he can’t reach the Other part of himself. And they’re chanting some long string of syllables that weave in and out of his ears.

  They tie him to an altar with strange ropes, like sinew, like roots, and if this is the end of him at least Kaylie will be fine. The Troupe’s good people. They’ll take care of her.

  There’s a crash outside, and the chanting stops as some of the hooded figures leave the dark room and its thick stench of rotting leaves. Scanlan drifts aimlessly, humming nonsense songs.

  Soon the figures return, and the chanting starts up again. The chanting maybe, or the room or the altar or the ropes... it’s killing him.

\---

   “I could do it. We get one of the robes, and I can get in. You know I can.”

  “I’m supposed to keep you - “

  “If you say  _ safe _ we’re gonna have an issue. You know someone’s gotta do it. Send me in, and I’ll make an entrance for us.”

  “Alright.”

\---

  The cultists continue their chanting in the dark room. A pair lean over Scanlan’s prone body.

  One of them snorts, snickering, doubling over. And through a haze of exhaustion, bound to this strange wooden altar, Scanlan smiles.

  (The first time he heard that snort, he caught it from the air and pressed it into a gemstone. What else is a father to do with his daughter’s laughter?)

  The other robe turns toward her, body showing confusion, maybe concern. With a flash of movement, Kaylie buries a dagger in the stranger’s throat and pushes back her hood. She meets Scanlan’s eyes for a moment and he sees rage and fear and worry, but she winks anyway. (Brilliant Kaylie,  _ his daughter _ .)

  She tips back her head, and her eyes catch the light oddly, and she  **screams.**

  Like dominoes, the long-limbed, oddly constructed cultists sway and start falling. And, of course, the door slams inward with a shower of splinters as Dr. Dranzel’s Spectacular Traveling Troupe arrives on the scene.

  His daughter shuts her mouth and turns her back on the fighting, retrieving her dagger from the neck with a  _ squelch _ . She begins cutting the bindings with a single-minded ferocity. When the final one snaps, she helps him sit up.

  Still dazed, Scanlan breathes, “Kaylie? Why’re you... did you come to rescue me?”

  Gripping his shoulders tightly, Kaylie looks right into his face and snarls, “Of course we came for you. We will, when you need us you damned fool, that’s what family  _ is _ . ‘Did you come to rescue me?’ Don’t even - don’t ask me that. Of course I did.”

  (They both ignore the tears in her eyes, the truth rolling under her words like a great bell tolling.)

  Scanlan smiles at her with blood on his teeth and replies, “Right back ‘atcha.” 

\---

  Later, when Doc has the Troupe relaxed and the music is flowing good and easy as the wine, Scanlan settles on a stump beside his daughter. She was amazing today, teeth bared on a grin, dagger catching light and blood. Now, in the twilight, she looks tired. She looks young.

  (One of the only truths Scanlan is absolutely sure of: he is unspeakably proud of her.)

  Kaylie glances up as he sits on the wide tree stump next to her, before looking away. Her jaw is clenched and her fists are clenched and she relaxes both with a visible effort.

  “So who were they, then? We killed some odd folk today,” and her gaze cuts back to his face, “and don’t you think about lying.”

  They both know he’s always thinking about lying. (Not to her, though. Not ever and not this time.)

  “They’re part of some cult. Killing me wasn’t exactly a goal of theirs, but I was... convenient.” (He’s been hearing the whispers of them for a while, but it wasn’t an imminent danger, so he hadn’t taken any steps. A mistake. He still makes them sometimes.)

  She frowns, and he sees the concern she’s trying to cover up. “Don’t be convenient again, then. And what sort of cult are we talking about here?”

  Scanlan contemplates, spends a moment  **Listening** for rumors, stringing them together with mutterings he pretends not to hear, tying them to words that resonate with meaning, the whispers of ancient things in the trees.

  “The thing they follow, the person, they’re like me. Not exactly like me, but you know, with the eyes.” And he hesitates there, because giving some things a voice is very dangerous indeed.

  Kaylie killed at least five people today, though, and she is undeterred. 

  “Who is it then, a problem we have to deal with?”

  “ _ No _ ,” he stops her, “ _ no _ , it’s someone young. I’ve never had a reason to go looking for the others, but I know what this one does. They wouldn’t want this. These robes - the Cult of the Knife is what they call themselves - they’re a perversion, Kaylie. They kneel at the feet of a lonely, sad image and think that it’s what they need to do and it’s  _ wrong _ .”

  “Thought you’d never met this person. How do you know what they want?”

  Scanlan scrubs his face with his hands and sighs. He’s so tired today. “I don’t think someone like that goes around asking people to murder for them. Whoever it is, they’re better than me, Kaylie. They help lost children. Evil people, I don’t think that’s what they do.”

  “Maybe this one does,” she huffs as she stands up. And his daughter pins him with a look that’s more caring than she’d ever admit to. 

  “Get some rest, old man,” Kaylie murmurs as she wanders closer to the fire and the rest of the Troupe.

\---

  Weeks later, Scanlan walks through the doorway of his room at the inn into Ioun’s Library - 

  It doesn’t happen. He’s standing the hallway outside his room.  _ What? _

  He tries again to step through the doorway, focusing hard, glowing faintly -

  It’s like running full speed into a stone wall. The way is shut. It’s terrifying.

  “Okay... that’s a problem.”

\---

  He tries Ank’harel and Westruun and Emon and even fucking  _ Vasselheim _ , and nothing’s working. In fact, in Vasselheim he figures out that none of the temples are hearing anything from their deities. Nothing at all.

  Something is very, very wrong.

  So he scopes out a tavern, and puts the word out. He better find the others like him, then, if the gods are taking some time off.

  ( _ Where are you? _ )

**Author's Note:**

> Scanlan's sort of known title in this world is something along the lines of "Scanlan Many-Faces, Kingslayer and Trickster," but the general public doesn't know everything about him. There's more going on under his skin that I'll get to in the future.  
> Title for this fic is from the song Things Behind the Sun by Nick Drake.  
> If you liked it, let me know! I'm excited to keep working with this story even as I lose my mind every week over campaign two (it's... so good.)  
> Let me know what you think! This is really fun to write and I hope it's fun to read too!  
> Next time: Our heroes talk to each other, actually advance the plot, and meet with some beloved NPCs.


End file.
